Mayor Mitch Landrieu, determined to move past the power outage that stalled Super Bowl XLVII for a bewildering 34 minutes, declared the event an undiminished success for New Orleans at a press conference Tuesday. "The power outage was an unfortunate moment for us and you can be sure that we'll get to the bottom of it," Landrieu said, surrounded by more than a dozen other notables from the city and region at City Hall.

"But 34 minutes of darkness will never overshadow or outshine the city of New Orleans or how we performed this Super Bowl week."

The Mercedes Benz Superdome

Whatever caused half of the Superdome's lights to flicker out Sunday evening, the NFL championship is thought to have pumped close to half a billion dollars of spending into the local economy, spurred city infrastructure projects and put the New Orleans recovery story on national display. Landrieu is intent on persuading league officials to bring the game back in 2018, when New Orleans will celebrate the tricentennial of its founding.